A misreading of a David Copperfield passage (1850) led to me rereading The Raven (1845), whose refrain I’d entirely misremembered, it seems, and whose point I’m not entirely sure I ever knew, but which more or less seems to involve a person being haunted by the idea of the permanency of death.

Aristotle, Politics 1.1253a29: ὁ δὲ μὴ δυνάμενος κοινωνεῖν ἢ μηδὲν δεόμενος δι’ αὐτάρκειαν οὐθὲν μέρος πόλεως, ὥστε ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός.

H. Rackham translation: “A man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.”

σ

………….L.………….a…..m
r.……m… h.….n
e..o…….. i………..n
h……r……… p….e
T………d………. a…j
E……..r……….. p……..c
G…..i………… e…….c
O……h………. r..t
lia…..b……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
φω σ Maryof Egypthamiσ ω φ
ρ .σ ωφCAh_ __ slmCAhσ ωφρ.
..σ ωφρ.ο…oki. VOTE………..eieieoki…….*^σ ωφρο…
σ ωφρσ..iaia HARRIS………..usnt…….*^σ ωφρσ
σ ωφρύ…..c..*^……….. E ic…….*^ύσ ωφρ
νης=======CO..νης….
B …………….. ti……
oj………..x……
j o t……

…

deal to mean a plank of wood

A couple surprises in this reading of Korematsu vs. United States.

First, the majority opinion doesn’t technically defend the Constitutionality of internment camps (though you could argue that it effectively does so) but rather that of the military exclusion order, under which the petitioner, Korematsu, was actually charged. (The exclusion order prevented him from living where he did, and he had refused to leave that area.)

Second, I was intrigued by Justice Jackson’s dissent. He says that just because a military order might be necessary and reasonable as an act of war (which is beyond the court’s purview to determine) doesn’t mean it should be adjudged as lawful. He thinks by upholding the actual constitutionality of these orders the court enshrines in the law a dangerous principle.

Third, I was surprised that more wasn’t made of the fact, by dissenting justices, that Italian and German were not affected by these military orders in the restricted zone but only Japanese Americans, with whom we were also at war. Perhaps it was understood the populations of the latter were smaller.

Tweet: The bigger story is we are creeping towards a global war. The autocrats have started to consolidate, shifting from malign influence to military aggression. The democracies… still asleep at the wheel.

Nice bit of chiasmus here: “…their offense picking apart Mets pitching, their pitching picking apart Mets hitting.” (Chelsea Janes, Post)

“Matter” and “material” apparently from māter — mother.

Euphorion: son of Aeschylus “known solely for his victory over Sophocles and Euripedes at the Dionysia of 431.” Some think he wrote Prometheus Bound.

Gaucherie et magnificence du Titien ! Admirable balancement des lignes de Raphaël ! Je me suis aperçu tout à fait de ce jour que c’est sans doute à cela qu’il doit sa plus grande beauté. Hardiesses et incorrections que lui fait faire le besoin d’obéir à son style et à l’habitude de sa main. Exécution vue à la loupe : à petits coups de pinceau. (*) (*)

Tweet: day of love

Instant meaning present in legal terminology

“The first people in the Universe,” Dickens called the French.

Dickens giving some insight into Uriah’s character, chapter 39: “I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting and revengeful spirit must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression,” Uriah having learned “when he was quite a young boy” that the way to get along was to “keep yourself down.” “I had seen the harvest,” reports Copperfield, “but never thought of the seed.”

While I would blame the press not the Presidential campaigns, I actually agree with George Will on the substance of this: that the threat of a global conflict among major powers is not nearly as salient in the news as it should be.

Main-truck. Moby Dick: But oh! shipmates! (…) Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?

These lines spoken by Hector (when he proposes to duel a member of the Achaeans) brings to mind (along with the fate of his own body in Book 24) the exchange of armor between Glaukos and Diomedes in the preceding book. In fact, the first half of book seven seems generally rather preoccupied with armor: people putting it on, people taking it off, its appearance in Nestor’s story, its appearance in these lines…. 7.76-86 (Lattimore):

“Behold the terms that I make, let Zeus be witness upon them.
If we the thin edge of bronze he takes my life, then
Let him strip my armor and carry it back to the hollow ships,
But give my body to be taken home again, so that the Trojans
And the wives of the Trojans may give me in death my rite of burning.
But if I take his life, and Apollo grants me the glory,
I will strip his armor and carry it to sacred Ilion
and hang it in front of the temple of far-striking Apollo,
But his corpse I will give back among the strong-benched vessels
So that the flowing haired Achaens may give him due burial
And heap up a mound upon him beside the broad passage of Helle.”

This passage also looks forward to the end of Book 7, with its gathering of the corpses and heaping up of a grave mound.

Mangle, as noun, from David Copperfield.

revealing picture (*)

I wonder if Dickens, in naming David Copperfield’s antagonist Uriah, was suggesting or thinking of the relationship between King David and Uriah the Hittite, in the story of Bathsheba.

In that story, of course, the David, as distinct from David Copperfield, is somewhat the villain, but still.